Italian tech company promises to make America Online great again

Bending Spoons, an Italian tech biz, is buying AOL from Yahoo, funded by a $2.8 billion debt financing package that will also bankroll future acquisitions. The purchase price remains undisclosed. Bending Spoons (BS) CEO Luca Ferrari estimates AOL has 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users, making it "one of the …

[DarkwavePunk]

AOL

I miss my seemingly endless supply of coasters. In the old days anyone using "LOL" was instantly flagged as an AOL user and shunned in the geekier parts of the internet. I guess they won that culture war. What a legacy.

[Aladdin Sane]

Consistently using "BS". Bravo.

[Kurgan]

Came here to say the same thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL addresses now mean older people

Surely the only people using an AOL address today are in the older generation who don't know how to change things.

This also means your client base will be literally dying off.

[andy the pessimist]

Re: AOL addresses now mean older people

My ifa uses aol.com for email. He is older (than me). I do trust him so I'm happy that he uses old tech.

[doublelayer]

Re: AOL addresses now mean older people

Assuming that I'm correctly interpreting IFA as independent financial advisor, old tech might not be the best depending on exactly what it is. I don't think there's any known security problem with having an AOL address, but there's plenty of other old tech and people who insist on using it nonetheless which I wouldn't want around my financial information. Depending on what they are doing and what data they have access to, I'd want more confidence that they know how to be secure with digital information and that they are using that knowledge, which means even using new tech isn't good enough for my comfort. Of course, I expect that many places will be holding my data insecurely, but if I'm hiring one, I'm in a position to make sure that one is not among them. Trusting the person is different than trusting that they won't do something dangerous by accident; there are many people who I am absolutely certain want only the best for me who could still make a problem purely by accident.

[Edward Ashford]

Re: AOL addresses now mean older people

Not always don't know, more "if it's free and still working why fix it?"

I only moved off Demon when Vodafone announced they were shutting down the email service. It took a year to winkle out all the places I was identified by my email address, and even then I missed a few. Since then things have got even worse.

My parents are now partially sighted, so the hassle factor just went up massively if BS do something daft.

[tiggity]

Re: AOL addresses now mean older people

Always worth using non ISP email using a domain you won & control so you have no hassle changing ISP as email address domain name * stays the same.

Obviously it is an additional expense, but not too costly as domains are (generally) cheap.

It's more awkward than it used to be though: Used to be trivial running your own mail server, but all the additional security hoops you now need to jump through (to avoid the likes of Google rejecting your emails due to SPF / DKIM / DMARC) mean it is more effort than it was.

* though always worth using a variety of usernames (ideally designed to flag what site that address was used with, as good way to check if data "leaks" to spammers etc.)

[DoctorPaul]

Re: AOL addresses now mean older people

My SOP for decades, I haven't used an ISP's email since I left Demon in the 90s (and more recently DNS) once I had a domain name and a hosting provider, so that excludes most people unfortunately.

I bung Mythic Beasts three quid a month for extremely reliable hosting and as they allow catch-all email redirection one mailbox supports an effectively infinite supply of email addresses, so I always use [e-mail] for every entity I deal with. If any address is compromised a) I know who is responsible b) it's trivial to spin up a new address and c) I just blacklist the compromised address.

No issues at all "running a mail server" as all the tricky stuff is handled in a couple of clicks on the admin page at MB, plus their tech support is exemplary.

On the subject of DNS, I've used Pi-holes for years (note the plural, always use two in my opinion) - never pointing at the ISP's DNS of course - but recently found that it's possible to add unbound to the installation so that you are independent of any upstream DNS provider. Has worked a treat for me.

[Gene Cash]

Bending Spoons?

That's an... interesting... name, considering it's related to James Randi exposing how Uri Geller was fleecing marks using his bending spoons tricks.

I'm pretty sure I would not want my company associated with that. Are they in the business of tricking people, investors perhaps?

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: Bending Spoons?

Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth... there is no spoon.

[anthonyhegedus]

When I used to service/fix home users' computers, if anyone had an AOL email address I just would say we can't fix whatever it was. They were too much trouble. Not necessarily old, but stuck in their ways, unresponsive to change and ultimately awkward to deal with.

[LBJsPNS]

And let me guess, the clients were equally as bad.

[sarusa]

The goal here?

I'm not even sure what the business plan is, here.

I guess they know they will have a couple million very gullible old people to fleece with scams, or at least sell access to them?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the spoon benders actually buying ?

From my reading not Yahoo! only Aol which seems to be 8-30 million geriatric email accounts and little else.

How BS intends to squeeze enough dollars out of Aol to service the financing is bit of a mystery.

BS might be able compel Aol users to ante up USD10.00/month but eventually most will move to a free provider.

Even if BS bolts on a chunk of gratuitous AI on to Aol services I cannot see any future purchaser mistaking the lipstick for the pig.

The utility of any Aol stored email for LLM training purposes given the demographics, is rather limited, I would have thought — possibly only of interest to retirement village and nursing home operators, ... and funeral directors.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: What are the spoon benders actually buying ?

So you're saying it's a load of . . . a load of . . . something, it's on the tip of my tongue.

[DoctorPaul]

Re: What are the spoon benders actually buying ?

Ugh, I should spit that out straight away!

[doublelayer]

Re: What are the spoon benders actually buying ?

From what I can see, there are a lot of little media pieces that were attached to AOL, and I'm not sure whether they still are or if Yahoo is keeping them. Several blogs like TechCrunch, an advertising platform, and the like. I suppose there's always a bit of strip mining you can do to those if you had them.

[kmorwath]

They also bought Vimeo....

What they do with this company looks a mistery - but someone obviously trust them, and lend them money. My take is there are still users to be squeezed for data. After all they made money with phone apps not among the most known ones, and I believe the money comes from users data - not the app themselves.

[Jason Hindle]

This is slightly worrying for me....

Back in caveman days, I had a dial-up and later broadband with AOL UK. I signed up for a service called iTunes because I bought an iPod, which gave me many years of happy bus commutes. I use that ID to sign into my iPad and MacBook. I don't think Apple allows changing the email address associated with an account.

[doublelayer]

Re: This is slightly worrying for me....

Fortunately, they do.

[An_Old_Dog]

The Plan?

* DIS-invest by firing a bunch of people, just as they did with their previous acquisitions. But call it "investment".

* Pull a Broadcom and jack up their rates/fees.

* Offer discounts to customers in exchange for allowing (more-extensive) data-slurpage; sell the gathered data.

* Something-AI-something?

* Profit! (???)